The letter F with hook (uppercase ÃÂ, lowercase: ÃÂ) is a letter of the Latin script based on the letters F and f with a descender hook added. The italic form of the lowercase letter is used as a florin symbol. A similar-looking letter, (a turned f for a voiced palatal with an implosive hook), is used in the IPA for a voiced palatal implosive.
ÃÂ is used in writing the Ewe language in a straight form to represent the sound , as distinct from the letter F, which represents an . It is also used in the Avatime, Lelemi, Nyangbo-Tafi, and Waci languages.
The minuscule italic ÃÂ, also called the florin sign, is used as a symbol for several currencies, including the former Dutch guilder, the Aruban florin, and the Netherlands Antillean guilder. It can be found as italic in non-italic fonts.
The italic ÃÂ has been used to denote mathematical functions, or to indicate aperture in photography (e.g. ÃÂ/2.8) in place of the more common italic <span style="font-family:serif">f</span> (in serif fonts) or oblique f (in sans-serif fonts). It can be represented with .
Older computer fonts and character encodings included only the minuscule form. Unicode includes both the majuscule and the minuscule.
The italic form of , ', looks very similar like the italic form of a Latin in some typefaces: most serif faces do so ('). ÃÂ and ÃÂ occupy code points and in Unicode respectively, and may be entered by appropriate input methods.
The character has been used on the Macintosh to mean folder, in particular as part of a folder name. For example, the game Bugdom, when included on some Mac OS 9 installations, was contained in a folder called "Bugdom ÃÂ". This usage has died out with the advent of Mac OS X. The Macintosh Programmer's Workshop also used the character to indicate software dependencies, from which the folder usage derived (the folder contained the files required to run the program).
The character frequently appears in Japanese mojibake. The lead byte 0x83 appears before a Katakana character in Shift JIS, but if interpreted as Windows-1252 encoding, it becomes the ÃÂ character.